Juanita Kinzie received a 32-year sentence Tuesday in Logan County District Court, after the court accepted a guilty plea to second-degree murder and child abuse resulting in death -- two class 2 felonies. Kinzie faced charges for the murder of her 3-year-old son, Caleb Pacheco.

According to the sentence, Kinzie, 24, would have the possibility of parole after 24 years.

Caleb's mummified body was discovered Jan. 22 wrapped in plastic bags and blankets under a mobile home on Platte Street, where he once lived with Kinzie. Logan County Sheriff's Office investigators were contacted by a concerned resident who had seen posts on Facebook from Kinzie's family saying Caleb had not been seen in a year.

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Caleb's father, AJ Pecheco, wasn't in court for the sentencing, but Kinzie asked him for forgiveness, adding that she's willing to hear anything he has to say.

“Whether it's anger, hate or forgiveness,” she said.

Judge Michael Singer accepted the plea in front of a packed courtroom, after listening to a presentation from public defender Tom Ward and an emotional statement from Kinzie.

The presentation, which District Attorney Bob Watson said he'd seen beforehand, gave a detailed outline of Kinzie's life. The point was not to make excuses for Kinzie's decisions, Ward said, but to give Singer an idea of the substantial difficulties Kinzie faced through life leading up to this point to show "a significant amount of mitigating circumstances" in the case.

A troubled life

For about 45 minutes, Ward gave meticulous details about the physical and sometimes sexual abuse Kinzie had experienced through her life, which led to heavy drug use, abusive relationships and family abandonment issues. Since 1995, Ward said she had 69 contacts with law enforcement officials. Kinzie's father had no interest in raising her and her mother had been physically abused and addicted to drugs.

Juanita Kinzie (LCSO booking photo)

She went to three foster homes before being adopted by the late Dorcus Kinzie, who lived in Sterling. Throughout her life, Kinzie had been in and out of 13 different schools, never graduating, and had been in relationships with myriad men -- some of whom she'd had children with, most of whom abused her and all of whom had criminal records, according to the presentation.

Kinzie has given birth to four children, but one of them died of whooping cough when she was two months old. She has also had two miscarriages. Caleb was born in 2007 when Kinzie was 20.

Ward said during the investigation everyone they asked said Juanita and Caleb had a strong bond and were "inseparable." But Kinzie had admitted to needing personal and financial help raising Caleb, at one point looking into the possibility of adoption before she was dissuaded.

Through this, Ward said Kinzie would always return to Dorcus Kinzie, who would help her collect herself after leaving abusive relationships or other hardships before leaving again. But when Dorcus died of cancer in September 2009, Juanita began heavily abusing drugs and returned to Castle Rock with a boyfriend.

"Nobody could take him from me"

Yolanda Kinzie-Graber, Caleb's aunt, stepped in to take care of Caleb at one point and tried taking custody of him in another. However, the presentation showed a conflict between Yolanda and Kinzie, and Ward added that Yolanda had put Social Services in a difficult position. She had called Logan County Social Services on two prior occasions, when they had found her kids clean, fed and in no apparent danger.

Ward later turned the focus more clearly onto Yolanda. He said she had dissuaded Kinzie from putting Caleb up for adoption and that she would not have been fit to take Caleb, either. She had her daycare license stripped and was issued a cease and desist order when she ran an unlicensed daycare and a child wandered off.

Many in the courtroom were taken aback by the court's inclusion of Yolanda in the case, with some saying she was the only one who had requested help from Social Services for Caleb. But Watson later said Yolanda's role in the case was pivotal and that he knew it'd be an issue.

“There's no doubt in my mind that (information) would've been admissible in court,” Watson said. “It may have looked gratuitous … but it explained her state of mind.”

Kinzie asked the court not to excuse any of her actions and gave a tearful apology, saying she “want(s) to make this better.” But she quickly focused on Yolanda as well, saying she turned to her when she needed someone to support and trust.

She described taking Caleb back from her, and while she didn't say how she killed her son, she talked about her feelings after she took him back.

“I took him back, and it was hard and we struggled,” Kinzie said. “I knew he was safe and that nobody could hurt him. Nobody could take him from me there.”

Cosmic justice

Singer said he'd learned a lot more about the circumstances surrounding Kinzie's conditions after the presentation, but accepted the views shared by Ward and Watson that Kinzie's history is not an excuse for her actions. He was careful when explaining his decision to accept the plea to highlight the possible alternatives a trial could have brought, saying the 32-year sentence falls into an acceptable range.

If Kinzie had been found guilty, he said, she could have faced life without parole. But if she had been found guilty of lesser crimes -- such as criminally negligent child abuse, manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide -- she would have faced a substantially lesser sentence of between one and 17 years, depending on the charge.

He said he's seen a wide range of sentences in similar cases around Colorado and accepted that 32 years was in the acceptable range (although 48 years is the maximum on a class 2 felony). A sentence of 32 years is also six years longer than the normal sentence range for second-degree murder.

Personal opinions on the matter were sparse, but Singer said the matter had already been judged.

"It's not a perfect plea. But should perfect be the enemy of good? Not necessarily," Singer said. "Many members of the community respond to these matters by asking for cosmic justice. This (ruling) is perfect in the cosmic justice sense."

Watson said he wasn't surprised with the outcome in this case. He said the prosecution and defense had done very thorough research on Kinzie and reached the same conclusions, adding that "who did it and how were never an issue." Had the case gone to trial, he said, there would have been a couple of issues, but the fact that there would have been a conviction was a "foregone conclusion." The problem wasn't the facts, but what a jury would have done with them.

Still, Watson said there was a level of empathy with people in Kinzie's situation.

"There's different degrees of horror. At random, someone breaks in to someone's house and murders someone," Watson said, adding that, regardless of the reason for the murder, "He's still just as dead."

"I get paid for determining what's the right thing. And the right thing is sometimes very difficult to find."

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